Squat Squat reviews PSPWare for Mac OS X

Since its launch, Sony has heralded the PSP as the ultimate portable entertainment device. It does gaming, photos music, video, and web browsing–after all. However both Sony’s expensive memory stick pro duo, and their lack of a proper psp software bundle have kept it from its full potential.

Memory stick prices are dropping, and Sony released their media manager software to help with syncing and video encoding. However there is no Mac client.

So what’s a Mac / PSP owner like myself to do? Nullriver software’s PSPWare attempts to fill this need, and does a very good job at it. PSPWare is a PSP synchronization program for Mac OS X. It syncs music, photos, movies and bookmarks to your PSP.

Syncing
PSPWare syncs itunes music playlists, iphoto albums, and web browser bookmarks from your Mac to the PSP. I can’t even begin to explain how this changes the way you use your device. I wake up, decide what playlist i want to listen to, what pictures to check out, and what movie to watch at lunch-click sync-and in about a minute I’m good to go. PSPWare automatically removes what you unchecked so you can change what you bring with you every day.

As a bonus, it incrementally backs up all your game saves and dumps your bookmarks onto the PSP. Anyone who has lost their hard work to a finicky memory stick can attest to the game save backup’s usefulness–And as for the bookmarks, it saves you a ton of time typing in www.squatsquat.com in the PSP web browser.

Video Encoding
If you’ve ever tried to encode video for any mobile device, you know it’s no picnic. Encoding vids for the PSP is particularly frustrating. PSPWare, for the most part, turns encoding into a two step process.

1. Drop video file into PSPWare window
2. Wait

Once the video is done encoding, check the video and click sync and you’ve got a PSP movie. You can even scrub through the video and pick a frame to be your preview thumbnail in your PSP’s menu. Very cool.

PSPWare handles MOV, MPG, AVI, WMV, VOB, DV and QuickTime formats with ease, so most Downloaded vids are no problem. Mobile ebaumsworld anyone? Encoding a DVD? Just use YadeX to rip the vob files to your Mac, then drop the vobs onto PSPware and let it encode. Voila!

Drag-n-Drop encoding comes with it’s price… File Size. Hi Quality videos come out about 300mb per hour of footage. While any Gig stick can hold this without a problem, if PSPWare supported the H.264 format, it would only be 100mb per hour. In the developers defense, I must say that I can understand why he hasn’t implemented this yet. Third party H.264 video encoding is still very buggy and unreliable.

The Bottom Line
PSPWare does what it does extremely well, and is very easy to use. It’s an absolute must for anyone with a Mac and a PSP. It’s only 15 bucks–Buy it!

Pros: Brings ipod-like ease to PSP media syncing. Encodes most popular video formats with drag-n-drop simplicity. Automatic game save backup. Super user-friendly.

Cons: Lack of H.264 format support. Videos take a little more room than they should.

PSPWare for Mac OS X gets 4.5 out of 5 squats

This entry was posted on Friday, March 3rd, 2006 at 11:55 am and is filed under PSP, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.